Here’s a cool find I thought I’d share quickly. It’s a thoughtful and inspiring movie about how the web influences or everday life and creates mass creativity. It’s quite positive and optimistic – and therefore I like it. There is enough pessimism around. It was created by Charles Leadbeater and is called “We Think”. Enjoy.

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Sometimes I stumble upon a piece of software whose usefulness doesn’t jump at me straight away and yet I somehow feel that here is something great – although I don’t quite realise where exactly the greatness lies in. One candidate for this category of software is MailTags 2.2 by Indev Software.

Tagging seems to be quite en vogue nowadays and that’s part of the reason why I took a deeper look at this application. In short, it is a plugin for OS X’s Mail.app that allows you to attach tags, ticklers, colour labels, iCal tasks and events and notes to mails, no matter if they are stored in a locally managed POP- or a web-based IMAP account. The plugin integrates seamlessly with the Mail.app’s UI in all kinds of ways: as a panel, as a popup menu, in the toolbar and in the application’s menus. Adding the information mentioned above to mails is easy, convenient and fast. But it’s only the first half of the packages usefulness. MailTags really starts to shine when it comes to work with tagged messages. All of the MailTags-Information is searchable with Spotlight which means that tagged Mails can be found in a blink of an eye with custom smart groups and folders.

Integrating MailTags into my workflow will probably take some time but the effort is very likely worth the increased efficiency and productivity it brings.

I have only just begun integrating another Mail.app plugin by InDev Softare into my workflow: Mail Act-On. I will report on my findings in a later posting.

Technorati Tags:
Apple, Software, OS X, Macintosh, Mail, Productivity, InDev, MailTags2.2, Mail Act-On

This is a test posting which was created using an iPhone. So far, it seems to be working surprisingly well.

I love my new MacBook, it is such a pleasure to use – powerful, lightweight, untiring, perfect (almost). I am looking forward to using my new companion on the road, at school, everywhere. I will benefit from this purchase in many ways, be it the at school where I can do much work in free hours that I could have done only at home before, be it when I have previously been forced to attend family meetings when I can’t stand participating in the never changing meaningless conversations and now can hide behind my 13,3″- screen (that in those situations seems just huge to me).

But on the desk in my home office, I just couldn’t find a truly ergonomic way of placing both, my trusted 20″ iMac and the MacBook next to each other while retaining equal usability on both machines.

In comes Teleport. Teleport is nice little utility that enables the user to use one mouse and one keyboard with multiple machines simultaneously and without constantly rewiring them. After having installed the software on both machines, setting up the mouse and keyboard sharing is a breeze. Teleport live as a pane in the system preferences. In most cases, clicking on “Share this Mac” on the machine that the shared hardware is not connected to does the the trick – provided that both Macs are connected to the same network.

I think I’ll probably do a short screencast over at Teachers’s Corner and walk you through the setup options.

At school I had a nice idea for a Christmas Greetings movie: People saying “Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year” in various languages of the world. This is what my students made of it. They had 90 minutes to find the translations and pronunciation samples on the web and practice them. On the next day we grabbed the school’s videocam and just recorded away. Back at home, I cut it all together in FCP and added the intro. Despite my involvement, I consider the finished movie my student’s work.

Leopard is still very young and it has yet saved me already. I was working on a new crossword puzzle for my students. You know, I am a lazy guy, so instead of creating one from scratch I just opened and changed an old one. Guess what happened? Yep, you are right, I mindlessly saved the altered version and overwrote the old one. Too bad.
In kicks Time Machine. I saved the new file again, this time with a new file name, and deleted the accidentally overwritten version. Then I travelled back in time and restored my original puzzle.

Thanks, Apple!

What I thought impossible has happened - Leopard has arrived. I am holding it in my hands. Unfortunately, I am at school and my Mac is far away. Can’t wait to get home!

I just received the email notification that Apple has sent Leopard on its way to me. Estimated time of arrival is 29th October.

I can’t wait. If only they could deliver it more quickly…

 I’ll post some screenshots and photos of my backup and install process.

I pre-ordered Leopard yesterday and because the education discount I get as a teacher was so tempting, I also ordered a Mighty Mouse. Can’t wait for both to be delivered.

 As far as Leopard is concerend, I was wondering for a short while whether Leopard Server is an interesting offer for me. I use an old iMac G4 800Mhz as a private file server and running a decent server on that machine would surely hold some advantages for me. Also, this podcast creation software that comes with Leopard holds some promise, too, despite or maybe because of the fact that the information on that beast are still pretty vague on Apple’s website.

 However, I decided to go with the regular client version of Leopard. It seems that many of the Leopard goodies like Spaces or Time Machine aren’t featured in Leopard Server. I’ll keep an eye on the server version though.

I also plan to visit the MacExpo in Cologne, Germany, this year. It will take place in the aftermath of the Leopard release and the only real “innovations” I expect to see will be Leopard enhanced versions various software titles.

Two exceptions for this prediction:

1. The iPhone. I can’t wait to get my hands on these, even if I can’t afford to buy one yet.
2. MacOffice 2008. I hope the M$ guys will show a beta version. That reminds me of the my plan to check whether M$ will be present at all…
3. Final Cut Studio 2. Not really an innovation, ok, but I will get the chance of checking out if updating to this package holds any substantial advantages for me.

I also look forward to meeting some of my clients, specifically the guys from BeLight Software - and I have yet to check whether any Devonians will be there.

I think I’ll also bring my camera to shoot some nice photos to post here.

Test posting, please ignore